Here's a chapter from my Novel "Mr. Bandookwala - M.B.A., Harvard," (as promised on my Facebook Page) to let you know what I have been working on.
I might confess here that writing this has kept me busy and I have even dropped out of regular contact of friends and well wishers, as well as, kept away from literary events. For me this is my life work after a failed novel and therefore I am writing as if I will never write again. Therefore, please give it some time.
As I have picked to feature here an intervening chapter (Chapter 3), you will not understand much of it as it is interlinked to the narrative that comes before and after. The chapter is only illustrative, posted here to garner constructive criticism (No, destructive criticism at this stage, please! Please!). If you have suggestions, or, something good to say please say it here. I lookforward to feedback on flaws (small or big), flow, narrative style, etc. etc. I have tried to be natural in spoken dialogue, which includes a lot of naturally-ocurrng profanities, so would advise younger friends not to read it.
This part of the novel is about Mr. Bandookwala's (the protagonist's) visits his old flat in Colaba where he was bought up, where his parents live and how he attempts suicide (which happens further on in anotherpart of the narrative of the story).
Look forward to your feedback!
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Chapter 3
After that day in March 2008, the smell of shit doesn’t leave me – the smell of deprivation and poverty. It follows me around every day, persistently, insidiously, making me pukey and wretched. Bombai – it has always been a city smelling of shit and piss. Its railway tracks are open toilets where men abashedly sit with their faces hidden in their laps (lest they be recognised) to shit. Probably, they know it is wrong, but the circumstances of their life in the crowded slums make them do this. Slums are the putrefying garbage heaps of society. It would sicken any person to live in its decaying entrails, lacking human dignity, lacking in human values. Violence comes naturally to them, yet a tenuous peace would prevail, enforced by men like Chota Chakli. The men who live there are helpless cogs in the wheel, a wheel that includes constructors like Himanshubhai on one side, the government on the other and the mob ever willing to extort. Slums are torn down, huge towers come up, and beside them the hovels of the poor rise up again. Everpresent. I hate the rank smell of the city. It disturbs me. The smell is of hydrogen sulphide, a powerful and destructive gas, the odour of which is pervasive and penetrating after it is expelled from the bowels. Anywhere you go you get the smell, overpowering, nauseating, quite shameless and vulgar. In certain areas it’s particularly strong: Bandra, Kurla, Wadala, and Charavi. It’s present like an odour of death in the curve of the Harbour Rail Line as as the train heaves and rolls towards Dockyard Road station. It’s present near the marshes of Mahim and illegal distilleries of Chunabhatti.
Oh! I forgot to mention the spit. Everywhere you go there are long arcs of red spit - on walls, in dark corners of buildings, on freshly painted government offices, inside urinals, and in railway stations and bus shelters – there they lay the secretions of the glands, so openly revolting. Just paint a wall white and overnight it is coated with reddish streaks of spit, coagulating over it, sending its offensive smell into your nose. It’s as if people consider the world an open toilet here, to be defiled and left unclean. People living outside Bombai say a peculiar smell envelops every citizen of the city, a repulsive odour, something of an aura. It’s a co-mingling of the smell of shit, spit and poverty, which hangs around in crowded trains and buses, overpowering the senses, and mostly you get used to it. It’s this signature smell that you and I carry, Priya dearie, I think, as I sit here and type this in the dim light of a dawn that’s breaking in dull metallic glint of copper and iron over the Marine Drive skyline. The bay is outwardly calm and serene with the waves progressing mesmerically in white plumes of surf towards the shore. I once sat next to a man in train, a man who wore a clean shirt and trousers with gold chains around his neck and sacred threads around his wrist. A man from a prosperous middle class background, I thought. He had a newspaper in his hand and was reading. He started spitting continuously through the window by his side, his lips expelling the spit rather expertly, in one fluid motion. An expert spitter, a master of the art. I asked him why he was doing it. He answered:
Thumara baap ka kya jata hai ?
He insulted my father for it! No shame! No guilt! No conscience! Shit, piss, spit and dust! There’s dust everywhere. It covers everything with its dark and amorphous coat: buildings, shops, tables, shelves, books, everything. It coats skin, and it accumulates in the armpits and groins making it look greyish-black. My darling Priya, be careful where you walk. I don’t want you to even feel any revulsion or pain. I am a concerned father, I would like you to have all happiness, straight from my bleeding Catholic heart, as big Mamma Catherine used to say. Big Mamma Catherine had a huge bleeding heart for the poor and the needy and I think I have inherited it. I mention all this because I feel for them – the poor. I am determined to do what I can do for them.
x-x-x
Then in the nightly gloaming of a restless city I go for a walk. I walk to Cooperage and then to Colaba Causeway across Wodehouse Road. It’s a sprawling city without borders. You wouldn’t know where the streets end and the homes begin, where the parlours end and the bedrooms begin, where the drawing rooms end and the rest rooms begin. There aren’t any walls or partitions, if at all there are, they are pulled down or drilled through. On the walls and gates are small shabby plastic bags and jute bundles. They contain a man’s/woman’s belongings. People do everything in a borderless condition. Once while travelling on S.V.Road with Harmeet to see the positions of our outdoor advertisement I saw men, women, and children sleeping on the sidewalk with only a transparent mosquito net held by twigs for protection. As I passed by, a man in in a vest and lungi was smiling and talking to his woman. The prelude to sex? It happens under transparent mosquito nets at night, on public grounds and parks, inside railway stations and bus stations, inside huge conduit pipes, anywhere is home, anywhere they can have sex. When I ask Harmeet “How do these people have privacy?” he asks, “What people?” He hasn’t noticed the people I have seen. He is blind to their existence. I don’t think he even knows they exist. Exclusion is for him a good thing, a convenient thing.
You know as I sit here and write in the eerie glow of an as yet unconsummated summer night, vulnerable, when all resolve leaves me and I listen to the sea and murmur of traffic, the roads down below is teeming with gleaming cars. I feel numb and disoriented. I am severely handicapped without a car. I can see a slice of the glittering sea and the electric-light-diffused sky as they meet in a subdued fusion of water and air over the horizon. Silence sits over my like a monster. I need someone to talk, to discuss, to pour out my woes. That’s one of the reasons I am writing this. The mind is a dangerous think if left alone. You become a victim of its emptiness. You feel distraught by its endless attempts to make you feel wretched. Damn Parul! Damn the whole lot of the Mehtas! They have discarded me like a used piece of tissue, they have driven me out like a dog, I can only sit here and feel helpless against the might of their money. Dust swirls from the tires of the cars that zoom past horns blaring on the Marine Drive.
Heat and dust.
Heat and lust.
Though I am not in the mood for poetry I make a note of the rhyme. Lust rips through me each time I am on the street and watch the derrieres of pretty girls. They fill me with anguish, those girls. They are so impossibly beautiful I dread to think what a brutish man could do to them: slap them, violate them, punch them, kick them, which is what happens in marriages these days. Then I think of you and despair. My despair sits on me like a brooding halo. I will kill. I will kill if anyone touches you. I anyone makes a lewd gesture at you, I will kill. That’s sure.
What’s the purpose of all this? Why was I uprooted from my life in the Los Angeles suburb? I had a car. I could go anywhere. Here I am a prisoner and my money supply is running low. Everywhere I am hemmed in by crowds. I try to board a bus to Colaba to go to Regal cinema to see a movie. I am on Veer Nariman Road. I can’t get in the bus because of the crowd. Each time a bus arrives the crowd elbows past me. If I take a taxi, I can’t squeeze my tall frame into its small space. My head touches the ceiling. If I walk I would probably be killed by the erratic traffic, because here we actually walk on the road because the pavement is full of sellers of sugarcane juice, cigarettes, betel nuts and leaves, and gram and groundnuts. Immediately after I resigned from Pinnacle Constructions a vituperative Veereshbhai withdrew the car and the driver, though he allowed you and Mamma to live in the flat on Malabar Hill. I don’t want his charity. I will live on my own. For him, that corrupt man, charity begins at home and ends there. So I sit here and write and write, which is all I can do till the divorce case comes up, darling, wherein I will fight for your possession. So be patient, Dadda will always be there for you.
x-x-x
Let me take you to an incident that happened that disturbed me. Remember that day we went to meet big Dadda Jimmy who lives with big Mamma in Elysium Manor - abode of the dead? In Bombai everywhere you go you will find these funny names on buildings: Queens Castle, Windsor Manor, Palm Court, Elysium Manor, Connaught House. The Brits wanted to replicate London in Bombai. Legacies of the British, they still stand, their once majestic arches and colonnades now harbouring years of dust and dry moss, its nooks grown with weeds or filled with the nests of birds. They look craggy, discoloured, their drains green with fungus and oozing excreta. Once decay has set in, nothing could be done, no repair could bring it back to its old charming state. So the buildings rot though hard rain and summer with the ancient architecture of the solidly-built stone structures fighting a losing battle to survive.
When you turn into Walton Road from Colaba Causeway you see a copper pod tree (flowering brightly in spring) and behind it the fake-art-deco walls of Elysium Manor. There’s a Bata shoe store downstairs. The lattices on the balconies and windows are maintained in the way Parisis do, scrubbed and with a coat of white paint. On the terrace are ornamental grills which hold rather ornate lamps. On the right of the wrought iron gate is a huge banyan tree which has stood there ever since I can remember, its vines spreading down to touch the earth, but cut by Jimmy so the tree doesn’t grow to an immense size as it is capable of. This is the place I called home before I migrated to the U.S. This soiled grimy building is hwere I lived, loved and dreamed. Receding slowly from memory and consciousness, this place of my youth, whenever I visit it, whenever I am away from it, probably because of its unchanged state, – you will know from this account how impermanent my life has been, – will for ever be called home.
You don’t like these places because of the old and decrepit people live there – in Elysium Manor - in the rotting building, reeking of death and disfigurement. It’s repelling to enter its big yawning front entrance leading to the stairs after all these years. Big Dadda – Jamshed Bandookwala - and big Mamma – Catherine Baretto-Bandookwala – are both bent and disfigured by age and the ugly detritus of guilt. Remember that day when we went visiting in March 2008? How big Mamma Catherine had gathered you in her arms and kissed you, how she wept seeing you were just like her, curly hair and all. As soon as you enter Elysium Manor from Walton Road, the stink of dissipation strikes you strongly from its slowly decaying walls covered by seepage and algae, the rubble and garbage lying in the unswept courtyard, the cobweb covered banister, and the dust accumulating on the iron grills that the residents have installed on their front doors for protection. This, darling, is the place I had spent my childhood in the company of the Wala Gang – Adi, Tyre, Mosquito, Screw and me, Bandook. Adi Soda was the leader of the Wala team; Tyre was the organiser, good writer of both prose and poetry; and Screw – what to say of Screw? – was the cool and handsome chap who could get into the panties of any girl in the locality without trying too hard, my teenage ambition of a man. I was jealous of him and we fought most of the time. He had this secret: he knew, yes he did, the monthly emotional cycles of most of the girls on Colaba Causeway and knew when to date whom; “strike when the iron is hot, hot, men, and when they are waiting to receive the juices, men. Women need sex as much as you do, men. Right now that girl in No.2 of Cusrow Baugh is getting really hot,” Screw used to say. Inside him the hormones ran really wild.
The only friend I have in Elysium Manor is Adi Soda. He is now a caterer of food for movie production houses. Feeding film crew in remote locations, feeding Russian dancing girls (ever present in song videos because of their white skin), cooking something special for the film hero and heroine according to their whims is his job. Tyre lives and writes from Poona and, I heard, is one of the country’s finest English poets since Nissim Ezekiel, and Screw as was his wont is in advertising and is heading an agency by the name of, well, what else - Screwala Communications. He runs his fiefdom by charming the panties off models and starlets and sex-starved, aging “Corporate-executive Type” women in multinational companies. Screw likes to provide his services to sex-starved women. They love him. A more appropriate name to his company would have been – Screwala Fornications. We played in the leafy sun-dappled Walton Road and inside Cusrow Baug. I have fond memories of Adi’s antics, his mimicking of Jimmy and old Mrs. Singaporewala who lived on the fourth floor of Elysium Manor. Her daughters were called duck and swan for their walking style which Adi could imitate quite faultlessly. He also could do an imitation of Stiff John Fonseca of Esperansa who was father of Evita, with whom I was foolishly in love in those days. I still am. Stiff John, Evita’s father, always walked with his hands held stiffly at his side. Well, those are my friends with whom I spent my childhood, played pakda-pakdi on our bikes, rode threesome with Screw riding the bike and me in the back with a buxom Parisi girl (I forget who, but she was his girl at that time) sandwiched in between – the most sensuous ride I have ever had - ran amuck on Colaba Causeway. We fought over petty things. All those things seem trivial now, hidden as they are from the eye in a vaporous haze. We beat up the usher of Regal Cinema when he objected to us sitting on the last row and fighting when, in a movie revival, MacKenna’s Gold was playing to a packed audience. The hall was quiet and only we were murmuring. We loved the movie and we were identifying ourselves with the characters in the movie – I liked Omar Sharif (though I resemble Denzel Washington more), handsome, enigmatic, so I laid my claim earlier than my friends - Adi Soda and Screw wanted to be Gregory Peck, the leader; and we weren’t finding a role model for Tyre - when the bespectacled haunchback usher shone his torch and asked us to stop. Before he knew it, we four set upon him and gave the Parisi-bawaji such a hiding he will never forget in his life. I haven’t visited Regal cinema from that day. Regal Cinema! The house of dreams and of cinema on the junction of M.G.Road and Colaba Causeway, opposite the Cawasji Jehangir hall. Many are the movies I enjoyed in its high portals, its cool walls resounding with stereophonic music, the softness of its torn seats like a sanctuary from the world outside. Oh! I remember how it gave me a sense of safety where love blooms and desire takes hold of one and one falls in love with all the stars.
Those were the days we discovered sex. After a show at the Regal we would find our crotches bulging and we would go weak in the knees when we saw girls, women, anyone. Women who would make us go weak: Catherine Deneauvu in Hustle, Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon, Julie Lamar in MacKenna’s Gold, Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. There weren’t so many movies in those days. So theatres such as Regal, Eros, Metro and Sterling announced revivals and we could see the best movies over and over again, sometimes five or ten times. I remember those movies better than movies of today, all forgettable ones. Those were growing up years with my friends and I was close to Adi, Tyre, Screw and Mosquito. Bombay in those days was a city teeming with brothels. That was till the Catholic Police Commissioner Monteiro cleaned it up. There’s this red light area near Kennedy Bridge in Grant Road, where there are the cages of Kamatipura, and there in the night were the fallen angels, faces made up, tawdry sari, swinging their hips seductively and walking, walking, walking under the harsh glow of sodium vapour lamps. Oh! Kennedy Bridge, of the jasmine-scented women, the pit of all Bombai’s soured dreams, the vortex of sins! The Wala boys used to go mad sometimes with lust. We would go for a tryst near Kennedy Bridge where girls from distant lands of sandalwoods and attar would sit in rows wearing jasmine on their hair, smelling of Navrattan Oil, their faces caked with Cuticura talcum powder. They would swoop like eagles on us, dragging us into their narrow rooms, staining our clothes, driving their bodies into ours in paroxysms of lust. They would talk the bazaar language, tease and cajole a tip after the act. No man would walk the streets of Falkland Road and Lamington Road without feeling the throbbing pain in their groins of the flesh of flesh waiting to conjoin with another in the dance of the mysterious Kama – God of love. He is not a man who wouldn’t be tempted to step into a lane lined by shapely women wearing jasmine garlands wafting the cloying smell of jasmine and burning incense and joss sticks. They would stand there and tease and entice, those dark-skinned Apsaras from the South of the country and the chinky-eyed ones from the North-Eastern states. I participated in the Wala Gang’s orgies on a few occasions before I caught a deadly clap infection and gave up. It took repeat visits to Dr. Colabawala with Catherine to get me healed and Catherine made me swear not to go to these houses of human misery anymore. “Don’t know what-what infections you catch, no, men, and me, is not there to take you to Dr. Colabawala, and buy what-all medicines, baba. Don’t do it, hahnn?” Dr. Colabala demonstrated how to use a condom by inserting it on his index finger and Catherine cackled loudly and hid her face.
Beside Kennedy bridge would be heaps of garbage lying rotting: wrapping paper, plastic pouches, banana peels, chocolate wrappers. There would also be dogs, cats and cows ruminating majestically as on any street of the city. Adi excited at the prospect of having a woman would spray a sickening-smelling deodorant on us. The cloying scent would drive the women mad.
“The pleasures of life, dikra. They smell of jasmine but their mouths are like the gutter. Don’t be deceived by their talk. In fact, don’t talk at all. They talk through their gutter-mouth like they know everything, they will give advise. They don’t know a thing. Who they are to give advise, hahn? Don’t listen. If you listen they will spread a curse over you, get you addicted, so you come again. Always use condoms.”
“Yeah, men,” Mosquito would say, “dey are discovering new strain of viruses all de time. No, no, I won’t do it, y’all enjoy.”
“If you don’t fuck men, then you don’t. It’s your choice. We won’t force you to fuck,” Adi would admonish.
“The migrant workers go there, not boys from good families, that’s where they get clap, syphilis, AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, I know, I read it in the papers, what men? Don’t be victims of ignorance,” Mosquito would lisp and defend himself, his incipient paunch like a jack fruit already.
“Hey Mosquito, don’t preach, eh? As if you are bishop Lame Lobo dragging feet and all. He...he.... You don’t do it if you don’t want to, finished, na?” Screw would say. All the women would get excited seeing Screw, his blemishless face, his limpid black eyes, his healthy hair. They would go mad and preen around him, casting him long glances. They would behave as if they have seen God himself. Some men have all the luck.
There we would sit Mosquito and I, while Adi, Screw and Tyre would finish screwing the ladies in jasmine and Cuticura and come out with their skins glowing. Yeah, sex did that to you. I knew a good screw did wonders to your complexion, but I was too repressed and inhibited after Catherine’s scolding. I also was afraid of becoming like Jimmy, a sex-craving animal, a man who has lost all sense of social propriety.
As for me, I felt pity for those women. Kamatipura, the cages, is where women are tortured and starved into submission, made into sex slaves, fed on continuous runs of Hindi movie hits, their minds in a haze from seeing those lurid sexual innuendoes and violence on cheap television sets purchased from Chor Bazar . Brutal men rape them if they don’t submit to their demands. Their personalities then take the coarseness of the men who control them. They are beaten, traumatised and discarded by their pimps, left to die like rats of the city’s gutters when they are old. Oh! Bombai, you heartless city!
No, no, no, I would cringe to touch those wretched women again.
x-x-x
Again, I digress. Sorry! I am so lost in thoughtful nostalgia about my childhood that I can’t resist the temptation of adding the above details, lurid as it might seem. Remember that day a year ago, darling. I won’t forget that day we went visiting to Elysium Manor. Remember the copperpod tree, then flowerless, the banyan tree leaning into the compound? The Causeway is teeming with stalls hawking knick-knacks and tinsel, rings, bracelets, chains, antique gramophones, horns, clocks and sextents. There are flimsy stalls selling silk wraps, scarves, amulets, rings, chains, crucifixes in ivory and rudraksh . In the narrow space between these vendors pass the big-assed Mammas, the cute Japanese, the white-skinned firangs bearing the faint whiffs their cultures and foods. Colaba Causeway has different culture altogether. I cut across big-boobed women and their equally muscled and monstrous-looking boyfriends, their arms and legs sheathed in rolling-rippling muscles. The sun is filling the Causeway with its evening golden sheen and, being a Sunday, people appear on dusty doorways, balconies, and yawning windows, pottering around scratching themselves.
Remember that day? I remember it clearly through the haze of hurts and humiliations. Big Dadda opens the grime-stained door and stares at me as if not recognising me. The flat that used to seem huge to me now shrinks before my eyes. There in the corner is Jimmy’s favourite chair – a Bombai Fornicator - may be, so named because people of Jimmy’s age used to fornicate on them. Anyway, it’s called a Bombai Fornicator, that’s its name! I don’t know why. His eyesight is bad. I don’t know his exact age but he is approaching eighty. He has grown old and stoops, his nose is long and covers his lips and chin, his hair is a solid white, the old fornicator. He wheezes as he moves around. He is dressed in a dirty draw-string pyjama and has on his sadra through which his kasti peeps out. Old age is encroaching around his eyes, the corners of which have very fine crow’s feet with bags under it. Then he shuffles around mumbling, actually grumbling about Madhav our servant. His voice is a hoarse rasp, as if he is shouting across a great chasm, as if words have to struggle through an endless tunnel to reach his lips.
“What took you so long, when I phoned you said you were on Marine Drive.”
“I was. Such traffic! My god, everyone seems to have a car. They drive like crazy. Where’s Mamma?”
“The bastards. No respect for law.” Jimmy reties his pyjama draw-string which has slipped below his protruding belly. His hands tremble.
“It has become worse. The driving I mean. With so many cars and buses on the roads it is going to be a nightmare.”
“They won’t have a place to shit but they will own a car, he... he... he....”
“Where’s mamma?” I ask again.
“She has gone to meet Mrs. Freny Sodawaterwala.”
Through the kitchen door on the right, a familiar face peeps out briefly, the face is dark, hollowed out, the eyes are sunken, the bald patch shines in the ambient light from the windows. He wears a discarded tee-shirt and shorts of indeterminate colour.
“Madhav-uncle, come and meet Priyanka.” I say to him. I was very close to him and call him uncle.
Madhav, comes out and picks you up and kisses you on the cheek. (I didn’t know then about a painful secret that was kept from me at that time, but you will know about it soon.) He seems unsure as he does this. He, too, has grown old. I wonder then, for a brief moment, if this is the fate about to befall me, age, wrinkles, hollowed eyes and decaying teeth.
“Madhav, go inside,” Jimmy’s voice has an edge, and turning to me, “he hasn’t been much of a help these days.”
I don’t know what turmoil is going through Jimmy. His eyes seem wild; he seems to lack control of himself. His voice breaks as he says it.
“But why, Papa, he is one of the family. You can’t treat him like this because he is old. Can you?”
“You don’t know. You don’t know anything, dikra. If he is, he should know his position in the family.”
His whole bent frame shakes with some unexpressed inner revolt. There is in his eyes fierceness as if one possessed. It seems my intercession has angered him further. But I can’t let Madhav-uncle be insulted this way.
“I don’t agree. I have known Madhav-uncle all my life. He used to take me to school.”
“You leave it to me how to treat my servants.”
“No. He is not a servant. He means more to me than a servant, Papa.”
“Like what?”
“Like I would consider an uncle, say, Dinyar-uncle.”
“Dinyar is my blood, my-own-blood, you understand?” He is possessed by some demon, some demoniacal force is eating him up insidiously and his Parisi accent is getting worse. I wonder if he would have a seizure of some sort and contain my own outrage. I admit I am very disoriented by the whole incident. What is he trying to say; what is he trying to prove?
Peace returns to the first-floor flat of Elysium Manor.
Shamefacedly, Jimmy goes and reclines on his Bombai Fornicator on which lies a crumpled copy of The Daily. He fumbles for his glasses lying on a table nearby. Then with shaking hands he tries to withdraw into the paper, trying to read. A man consumed by his sorrows! Business has been bad, of late. No export orders are coming from Turkey. I feel sympathy for him. From the door of the flat comes Catherine, your big Mamma. She ambles into the living room and takes you in her arms. My mother, my mater, my all! She doesn’t even look at me and her attention is towards you. She laughs her full-blooded manly laugh, the masses of flesh around her bosom quaking, a bosom I know so well, having lain in it looking at the endless procession on Colaba Causeway during enactments of Christ’s passion by the Holy Ascension Cathedral Parishioners. I have also enjoyed the processions of devoted ones of Lord Krishna during Gokul Ashtami, clutching to that ample bosom filled with soft flesh. Catherine is also growing old and has the look of a fat elderly matron (as portrayed in some European paintings) around her thick waist and ample behind. Of all the women I have ever come across: those whom I have desired, or, flirted with, I like her the best. A woman who still surprises me, excites me, enchants me.
“Dinshaw, Dinu, Dinny, sonny, come give Mamma a kiss,” she says.
I peck her on the cheek and return to the sofa. Her skin is like paper on my lips. Yet I like it.
Remember how Catherine looked at you with those adoring eyes and kissed you? She has this mind that alternates between love for her own and hatred for the world. For the world she has a feeling of betrayal. She uses strong scatological language to express this betrayal, some hidden thing that she doesn’t want to come out into public view. Her cuddling you, cooing to you, evokes a fleeting vignette impressing in memory, dully reminds me of the way she used to coddle and mollify me when I was restless and upset with the world, bawling my head out at the misdemeanour of my friends when they used epithets like “Black Parisi” to tease me. Yes, she was and is my refuge, this big brown woman.
“I have baked some cakes, darling, men, my sweetheart, cho-cho sweet, come to Mamma,” she says. She spends an awful lot of time in the kitchen baking and experimenting with cakes and sweets. She used to do it for me when I was a kid. She is a preen-er, a big brown woman with wide hips and capable hands. Parul doesn’t preen like her. No, she is more wooden than a preen-er. Around her face is a glow as if she has just been to the confessional of the Holy Ascension Church and is free of all sins. The Catholic she is, she still goes to the Cathedral on Wodehouse Road to expiate her sins, though she is a professed witch. In her case witchery was an accident. She was influenced by her widow friends – Freny and Alzira. They were the bitter ones with agendas, not her, who was content to always be herself, leading an uneventful life in the bustle of a small and sultry by-lane of Colaba Causeway.
I settle down on the sofa in the living room and watch all the familiar objects of my childhood: the table I used to study at, the place where I used to hang the keys of my Yezdi bike, the rack where I kept my shoes, the cupboard where I kept my shirts and underwear, all the same. It hasn’t moved an inch since I went away. It seems so placid and so serene except when Catherine had one of her frequent hair-tearing bouts of bad temper she reserved for Jimmy when she suspected he has been to one of the bordellos that Colaba Causeway. How would she know? Because there would be blackmailers waiting to let the world know who has been to which house of ill-repute. The city is full of such evil-eyed people of a lowly nature, servants, watchmen, toilet-cleaners, and sweepers. It was traumatic during my childhood. Has anyone lived within walking distance from a whorehouse? Well, I have. I know what it can do to men of Jimmy’s type. He would go wild with lust. Catherine would smell his underwear – only wives would do this – and smell the strong cheap perfume of the other woman in it. “You whore-monger, you randi-baaz , you besharam , you son of a filthy gutter rat, you unclean one polluting my bed, you are a beast having bara lauda ,” and she would let it rip, throwing anything that would come handy, the washing machine pipe, the buckets, the pots, pans, plates, anything. I don’t know where she learnt her profanities but she had the mouth of a guttersnipe, a vile and vitiating creature when she was upset at Jimmy. Then I would feel sorry for him, the debauched man, a creature of his demented passions, now sitting and pretending to read the newspaper.
I don’t wish to disturb the peace that exists like a touch-me-not in the house. It’s too fragile. So, we sit uneasily in the living room, Jimmy and I. The day goes on. Time whines in my ears. Outside I can hear the roar of traffic on Colaba Causeway. We say nothing. I know he is hostile. He didn’t want me to come back to the country, said it was the wrong decision to take. When I completed my Higher Secondary School with the fifth rank in the Moomoori Pradesh state, he raked up all money he could so that I could go to the U.S. “Don’t live here, dikra , this country is not for you. This is only for corrupt people as me, morally corrupt and without a future,” he said pressing my ticket to the U.S. into my hand. I had already got admission for a B.S. at Berkeley. From there it’s been a long journey, I will tell you about that journey in some other account, some other time, Priya.
Madhav Shindey comes and places two cup of tea on a teapoy before me and Jimmy. He bows his head to me, hands on his chest, I bow back. He has this servantly attitude, learnt or inherent, I don’t know. Jimmy, I know, has a colonial attitude towards servants and encourages this. He would always be so subservient I would feel sorry for the fate that has compelled a man to be thus. Such subservience is not good. He doesn’t say much. He, too, is old I notice. When I was a child he would take me to St. Xavier’s School and back. He is dark, as dark as me; he wears shorts; his deep-set eyes are hollows of watery misery. I think he weeps for the great tragedy of his life, whatever it is. (The way I weep now.) I gave his son Eknath a job as my peon in Pinnacle Constructions as a favour for the way his father looked after me. He is a good man not corrupted by the ways of the world as Jimmy. How apt that people living in Elysium Manor are on the verge of death. That way a majority of the residents of the buildings of Colaba Causeway – Cusrow Baug, York House, Esperansa - are inhabited by people who have been abandoned by their children who have gone to more affluent countries.
“How’s business, Papa?”
I said this as a statement, not a question. I don’t know if he will respond.
“Bad. Too bad. There’s no export happening. The last time I exported something was two months ago.”
“You know, there’s a recession that’s coming, the trend is already showing. Things will be like this for some time.”
“I don’t know about recession-bicession, or, incision. All I care about is saving me from extermination. He... he..., (laughs mirthlessly) it’s not going good, not good at all.”
He again goes back to looking depressed. I can see only his beak-like nose, the thick-framed glasses and his wrinkled pate from where I sit. I hate it when he makes these sad attempts at being funny when he is depressed. He comes out as hollow.
I look at him lolling on his Bombai Fornicator, the deep furrows on his forehead, his dirty sadra and pyjama. During his time he was a swinger, a cad, a loose cannon. Now he is nothing, broke, and growing old, not strong as before, and is dependent on his wife and me. Sitting with Papa is similar to inhaling poison gas and dying an excruciating death. He talks little.
x-x-x
I go and stand by the window. The copperpod tree is so close I can touch its branches. The wind plays a soft murmuring symphony in its leaves. Memories come flooding in. Memories of those days. I can see the steep sandstoned entrance of Cusrow Baug across the bustling Colaba Causeway – Playground of Lucifer, according to Bishop Lame Lobo. Cusrow Baug is where Screw and Tyre still have homes. Though there is a Wadia gang in Cusrow Baug, Screw and Tyre are members of the Wala Gang. Tyre is mostly in Poona looking after his grandparents who need constant care. Screw – a creator of images and brands, and occasionally, babies for high-society babes - has moved to a tony apartment on Pedder Road with the ill-gotten wealth of his advertising business. What advertising he does? Hardly anything. I call it more of pimping. Across the street towards far right beyond York House I can see a bit of Esperansa (meaning beautiful), where my fourth friend Rudolph Mosquitowala lives.
Esperansa! Oh, Esperansa! You edifice that is named beautiful, rising steeply above Colaba Causeway, grandly overlooking its teeming maze of lanes and by-lanes. You are where the celestially beautiful Evita Fonseca lives, she of the smile sweeter than honey, the giggly laugh, she of the curly bangs on either sides of her face, she of the quick, pouty and offended look. The super witch according to Alzira Misquitta, Rudolph’s mother, because she had refused the hand of her son. Alzira and Evita are neighbours in Esperansa. The rumour is that Evita, the super witch, turned a man who had teased her with a wave of her hand into a beggar with no hands, no legs, and no clothes, shamed him into never looking at women again. He was never heard of again on the Causeway. We all were crazy for her including Rudolph Misquitta, or, Mosquitowala. She was the most beautiful and flirtatious girl on the Causeway, flirty yet uncompromised. Still a virgin. Hopeful boys, M.B.A.s, engineers, doctors, holding big flower bouquets, had to be driven away from her door by her mother Betty Fonseca. “Boys, men, why you trouble her so much, no? She not caring whether you are big-big engineers, M.B.A.s, or, doctors. Immaterial. She only want a man with a clean soul, good clean moral values, and only she will decide in the matter.” The witch she supposedly was, she had played Mother Mary in the nativity play that the parishioners of Holy Ascension Cathedral had put up for Christmas. She had such a look of piety as she wore the long-sleeved dress of the blessed Madonna. She had us mesmerised.
“Could you imagine any one else playing Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception?” Screw, he an authority on women, had asked.
“No.” I had replied.
“You know why?”
“No.”
“Because, dumbo, she is still a virgin. The only one on Colaba Causeway.”
He should know. He has wooed and bedded almost all the eligible girls of the Causeway.
Sometimes she would hangout flirtatiously from her fourth floor flat balcony and we would all look up to see her during the pale glow of the evening hours. She was a Lolita, a nymphet, flirty, loving. The Anglo, Catholic, and Parisi boys of the locality, all crazily in love, would gather at the gate of Esperansa, hang around on the hard concrete sidewalk of Colaba Causeway and remain there well into the night. There they would debate over who she was seeing tonight till the mosquitoes would swarm over them, knowledge of their lovelessness would descend on them, and give them malaria, dengue and chickengunia. Screw took her to a movie once. And he nearly died from embarrassment considering the attention he got from the crowd. I dated her a few times after the meeting in Metro Cinema for Dr. Zhivago, in movie halls such as the Sterling, the New Excelsior, the New Empire, and The Regal where I had sat mesmerized as swarms of butterflies flitted on in the bluish projection light and she would have me completely under her spell. She is a movie maniac. I still can remember that day.
I remember being always in love with her, looking at the steep walls of Esperansa, to her balcony to see if she was hanging out of it the way she used to, her two hands on the railing, her head and top half of her body outside, catching the sun as it slanted on her blue-black hair, her perfectly sculpted face, and the little sweet apples of her breasts. She was a vision. Once I caught sight of Screw looking up at her fixedly and a smallish crowd gathering around him as it often does in Bombai. Lady-killer Screw, the benchod, and the crowd, they unashamedly stood looking at her hanging out of the balcony, and slowly as I watched, a form in white floated down on a chariot made of butterfly wings; its black hair just like her’s caught the sun and flashed in million hues blinding all present as she touched her admirers with a feathery wand, like an Apsara of the Hindu Gods. Oh Apsara! From then on she took the aura of someone heavenly, someone in a legend born on the earth to people’s dreams. But to me, she remained Evita, the desirable one, the girl who sought clean moral values.
Mosquito’s mother, Alzira Misquitta, a former witch like Catherine Baretto-Bandookwala, now reformed, however, still calls her a witch par excellence, who has crossed the line of witchery into a fine life of a heavenly being. Alzira says she ha seen Evita making potions out of scorpion legs and grasshopper wings and feeding it to gullible and nice Catholic boys like Rudolph Misquitta, to ensnare them. This was only her bitterness, as in actual fact Evita had rejected Rudolph Misquitta. The threesome of Adi Soda, Mosquito and me, we have a secret bond of witchery binding us. Adi would say, “Arre, bechod, this secret society of witches was created to drive away the boredom only, men, when our mothers met to gossip under the Ashoka Tree in the compound of the Cadedral, after they brought us lunch, baba. Huhn? All this big-shig talk is nothing else, see. There is no witchery, no fitchery, it’s fuck-all rubbish. A good fuck can cure all the shit of the loveless hags, men.” Adi didn’t believe in witchery and saw Tum Tum Mata as a beggar woman fooling the public with her superstitious mumbo-jumbo. I agree with him.
They used to call it “The 3 p.m. Witchery of St. Judas,” Judas being the disciple who betrayed Jesus and thereby was denied sainthood, and 3 p.m. being the time they met. There they schemed their dubious and wish-fulfilling erotic dreams as the corpulent Archbishop of Bombai slept his deep sosegado sleep. Around the “three witches” as they came to be known, was the halo of mosquitoes, the manifestation of their love deprivation. In a nearby chamber, not far away, Lame Lobo, the Rasputin of the Archdiocese, was deep into one of his frequent flirtations with a comely member of the parish choir.
x-x-x
Again, standing at the window of the flat in Elysium Manor, triggered by the symphony of leaves of the copper pod tree and the lazy hum of evening traffic, I digress in my narrative into what my childhood had been. Still in my dreamy state I walk to my room in Elysium Manor. It’s at the end of a passage that has entrances to my parent’s bedroom and the long narrow kitchen. Not a thing has been moved. My room is preserved the way I had left it. The bed is in the same place, the cupboard is full of my books. My literary oeuvres – notebooks and notebooks full of them – line the shelf. The medals and cups I had won for writing, debating and studies are where I had left them. The windows are a palimpsest of worn dirt marks, beside the bed is the stains in dark circles where I used to lean with a pillow against the wall while I studied. I used to write: poems, stories, essays, some of them published in The Daily and the Sunday sections of other newspapers. I even started a novel on the Wala Gang in which we were leaders of a revolutionary uprising on Colaba Causeway leading to the defeat and dethroning of the rival Wadia gang of Cusrow Baug. I was not much of a sportsman. However, I was in the school football team. On one wall, suspended by a hanger, is my football jersey with St. Xaviers written on it and the number 8 in a monstrous-sized letter. I take it down, hold it close to my face, it smells fresh and newly washed. Catherine must have washed it knowing I was coming. I lie on my bed, my own bed, where I slept all through my childhood, and my eyes mist. A sob chokes my throat as I look through the eyes of the hopeful teenager I was, unsure of what the future held for me. I was afraid as I was always thinking about the future and worrying.
Outside my window I can see the banyan tree I used to love to watch lying in bed. I look at it now, its leaves playfully fluttering in the wind. I love the tree. It used to keep my room cool during the hot and sultry summer. We Walla boys would clamber up on it and Adi Soda would tease me from a bough singing loudly our corrupt version of a bawdy English song “In the Morning”:
In the morning, in the morning; in the morning by the sea
In the morning, in the morning; in the morning by the sea
If I were a doctor’s son and if I were to marry,
I would marry a doctor’s daughter more than anybody,
I will inject and she will inject and we will inject together,
Getting up in the middle of the night, we will inject each other!
(Chorus)
He was mad. Adi Soda is still mad. So was I. Heard of the term yeda Parisi? That was us. We did some crazy things together. Then I go up to Adi Soda’s flat on the second floor. There’s an iron grill on the door that wasn’t there before. The unpainted door shows years of dirt marks, now congealed into a black coating. Adi’s monther Freny, the witch, kind and delicate of speech and behaviour, opens the door. Freny is haggard and aged. Her hair has grown thin, string-like and white. Wrinkles have grown dense around her mouth and loose flesh hangs from her neck looking like the dewlap of a bovine animal. She is wearing a mother hubbard with prints. Age has caught up with her and I stand there shocked by how old age changes people.
“Oh, Dinny, Dinya, my son, how are you?” She pecks me on the cheek, “Oh, look what you have become, oh, Zara, oh, Mata.”
Mata means Tum Tum Mata.
“I am fine Freny-auntie, and you?”
“How can an old-old woman be, feet in the grave and heart in her mouth. I am just a poor old woman, nobody cares for me, witch and hag that I am, no?”
“No. You are always too precious to be a witch. Stop this witchery and buffoonery. It doesn’t become you.”
“Oh, Dinya, how can I make you understand, the feelings of an old woman. Though I am smiling, it’s hell inside. Always hell. That’s why I am looking so old-old.”
“Never mind. Where’s Adi?”
She informs me that Adi Soda is on tour with a film production company making a blockbuster historical movie (I am sure one in which women in period costumes dance synchronically), making their food, feeding the stars, and would return next week. Contrary to the air of domesticity she portrays, her witchery includes conducting psychic séances in which she speaks to dead people. She invites me to come in, which I am sure is to give me a potion with live gekkos and cockroaches in it to ward off the evil eye of the malfeasant people of the world. So I tell her I will surely come another day. I had met Adi Soda once since I had come back from the U.S. and he had put on a lot of weight from eating the rich food he made for the film stars and celluloid crews, the wild bunch he parties and drinks with.
“Dinya, now you are here, I must give warning-sharning you.”
“About what?”
“Oh, the fights!”
“You mean Catherine and Jimmy?”
“Yes.”
“Do they fight often?”
“Every day, they fight-shight. Not good no? What will neighbours think? I keep hearing crockery breaking.”
“How can I stop them auntie. I have tried.”
“Only suggestion of mine. Get rid of Madhav.”
“Why?”
“He is a bad omen. I have consulted my crystal ball.”
“But he is a member of our family.”
“Never mind. Get rid of him.”
“But, why?”
“There’s a reason, a reason beyond all reasons, which will slowly, slowly reveal itself.”
I am hurt by the way people are treating Madhav. Is it because he is poor and from a low caste? Havn’t they been able to get rid of casteism after all these years? I was innocent then, unknowing of the revelations that would come later to me, which would uproot the very concept of my own self. I find myself being challenged all the time. I am made to feel like an imposter, an outsider, an outcaste who reside too much in the past and have nothing to look forward to.
x-x-x
I say goodbye to Freny-auntie and descend the steps to the first floor where my flat situated. What reason was Freny-auntie referring to? What are they hiding? What does the whole world know and I don’t? It seemed to me then that there was some conspiracy going on. This is an uneasy homecoming: first, being adopted by a wealthy Zoozoori family, second, living in the plush locality of Malabar Hill, owning an expensive car, and living a spoilt life. From my contented life in Mountain View I was flung into a cauldron of corruption and venality I could barely withstand. My entire being militated against it. Then the unthinkable happens. It’s an aberration; I like to think of it as such.
As I descend the stairs I can hear Jimmy screaming and the whiny voice of Madhav; distinctly, that of a man who is broken, unsure, unsteady and mournfully sad. Parul opens the door and there stands Catherine in a fit of rage. You, dear daughter, was holding on to Parul’s kameez afraid and crying. I hate scenes. I could hear Catherine saying in her high-pitched bossy voice.
“Don’t you ever touch him again, unnnnerstandd, Mr. Bandookwala? You are not to touch him ever again.”
To this Jimmy blabbers, “Shut up, Mrs. Bandookwala.”
“I will not shut up. Besharam . I refuse to let this happen in my house. What will people say? Huhn? Make big-big noise, and all? Yeanh?”
“You don’t know what I have been through for yourall sakes. Do you?”
“What the fuckall you been going through?”
“Bloody should I say it loud for the world? Bitch!”
“You are totally, entirely responsible for what happened to you. You know that.”
“You have spoiled that man. He is a menial servant. He needs to be put in his position.”
I barge into the flat not comprehending the ruckus that was going on. I haven’t grasped the situation yet. There’s Jimmy’s tall bent figure, his face a mask of bitterness, standing over Madhav with his belt in his hands. There are welts, red and purple where the belt had been laid Madhav, on his wrinkled hands and feet. I run to Jimmy and snatch the belt from him. He glares at me quaking with indignation.
“Has this happened before?” I ask Catherine.
“Yes, this man beats his poor servant all the time. He has become mad, this badwa .”
Madhav is crouching on the floor the hair on his bald head in wild disarray. He is moaning and distraught, his face hidden between his legs, sitting there crouched in a corner of the living room. He looks as if all human qualities have deserted him and shows the behaviour of an animal. A helpless animal! It’s not the hurt but the humiliation that is making him cringe. Catherine is standing beside him, shaking with unbecoming rage. She is muttering to herself something about, “Black nights, blacker than hell, spilling over into day,” “Jasmine scent of woman,” something such. I don’t know. What had made Papa hit Madhav? Was he mad to hit a man who was a member of the household, had stood by us in all circumstances? I didn’t know things had deteriorated so much in my absence. I also don’t understand Jimmy’s blind rage which is making him tremble so much.
I go to Madhav, put my arm around him, hug him, and make him stand up.
“I will not live in this house. I cannot, Dinshaw-baba.”
“Nothing will happen, Madhav. You must.”
“How can I when sahib is angry with me?”
“Papa, what is this you have done?”
Jimmy is blubbering incoherently.
“You all have conspired against me. The ungrateful machod, what haven’t I given him, what haven’t I done for him. I am a nobody, no? I am worthless, no? You all have ruined me. Oh Zara, merciful, just lift me up this moment. I don’t want to live. I want to die.”
I hate scenes. The house is in uproar and probably Freny-auntie and the rest of the residents are hearing what was being said from the landing. I find the advise she had given to sack Madhav, rather mysterious.
“What’s all this nonsense you are saying, Papa?”
“Ask that woman, she knows.”
“What do you know, Mamma?”
“He hit him when he didn’t get his biscuit with his tea. He and his belt! Used it on the simple unarmed man! Poor man, he knows nothing. Then he asks him why he kissed Priya.”
“But papa, Madhav is part of the family. You shouldn’t treat him like an outsider.” I say.
“His caste cannot be a part of my family.”
“Caste, you are talking of caste in this day and age?”
“Mr. Bandookwala,” Catherine says, “you are going mad. Nothing else,” turning to me she says, “He is a disgrace, see how he cringes, but still doesn’t regret his actions. Oh, God, why is this happening to me, in my house, of all the places? Haven’t I offered you ‘Hail Mary’s’ Lenten fasting, offerings to Tum Tum Mata and money for the poor in the ‘poor box’? Why am I being tested like this?” I know this kerfuffle is all over town by now, in the Parisis Cusrow Baug, in the Catholic Esperansa and beyond.
I didn’t know Jimmy is a casteist and racist. He is such a confused man he doesn’t know what he says or does. I guess dementia and the frustration of being a failure in life is setting in. Couldn’t Zara have given me a better man as father?
Freny-auntie is at the door, you, poor darling, you are crying, and Parul is looking nonplussed, not understanding anything. Madhav is still crouching crying into his hands, a pathetic figure his lean withered hands and legs so incongruous I feel sorry for him. Catherine stands oddly her bulk spilling out from her Mother Hubbard, her face black in uncontrolled rage. The reason for what happened that day still eludes me, some dark secret they, only they knew about. What secret? Yeah, families have such secrets hidden in the dark folds of their bedsheets and mattresses, which I hadn’t realised at that time. The sheets, the mattresses, the doors, the windows must have seen what transpired on somnolent sultry summer afternoons, rainy monsoon evenings and cool winter evenings of concupiscence, of the overwhelming prurient madness which pushed man and woman into seeking temporary respite in sex. Right then I didn’t know the undercurrents, the deep flows of emotions that was driving Jimmy into such a rage and Catherine into such denial. Of course, you will read about it in the later pages, dearest, have patience. Right then I wanted to run away, be rid of the place, and leave the suffocation of tortured and tormented souls. Right then all I wanted was to go away from the sights, the experiences of my childhood, the room where I had dreamed, the books and memorabilia lining my shelf, the streets where I had walked, the unforgettable Colaba Causeway, to some place far, far away. Away from this madness.
I gather you in my arms. I leave. I swear never to return.
The next day I learnt from Mamma that Madhav – the poor old broken man – had left home that night for where he didn’t say. He had opened the door when all were sleeping and left home closing the door carefully not to wake up the family, carrying only a plastic bag with his meagre belongings: shorts, round-neck tee shirts, his paan box, and a cardboard box containing something mysterious, content of which I only came to know later. May be he has gone back to Shegaon, Matur district, where people have sex out of the daze of heat and boredom. When Catherine awoke he wasn’t in the house and the automatic night latch of the front door was closed. She had run out and searched the entire building, the terrace, the landings, he wasn’t anywhere. Disappeared! He wasn’t the sort who would commit suicide. I can’t be sure, but his grief seemed large enough. He seemed in the clutches of some massive deadening sorrow which I couldn’t for the life of me fathom. Now I know. But then, that is for later in the story, darling.
x-x-x
As I sit here and type after my morning walk on Marine Drive I can see the faint outline of Pinnacle Towers in Malabar Hill, the architectural folly, the blunder of rich-man Himanshubhai. My thoughts are spreading wings and flying through silver clouds, I am on an elevated plane from which I can view the realities of my situation. I see a city in awe of money, in the gutters of which flow greed like blood through veins. It’s a city where man refuses to sleep for fear of losing money, where fear haunts every waking moment, and you will be ripped off all your cash if you aren’t too careful. There are well-dressed charlatans with get-rich schemes, pimps luring girls with movie star offers, and publicists offering to make you into a page-three celebrity. The rich are so rich, no one can touch them and live to tell their story. They live in a different world, a menagerie of air-conditioned comfort, a moated fortress through which no one can penetrate. I read about another rich corporate czar who is building himself a fancy tower worth a billion dollars – the costliest residence in the world – with six floors for parking his cars, two private helipads, and two floors for accommodating guests. The latest news is that he is afraid to move into his billion-dollar-home because, according to a report in The Daily, “Its structure violates the traditional architectural code of the Vastu Shastra .” The contradictions and conflicts are great, indeed humungous. I will only enumerate some of them in this account.
The obscenity of it all!
The madness of it all!
For the first time I am afraid. I could be hunted down and killed. It’s a jungle where Himanshubhai and his friends in politics and the police are the wild animals. For them taking a life is just as routine as washing their behinds every morning. There’s wealth in the country, but it is rarely shared with the poor. Elsewhere in the world it would have caused an uprising similar to the French Revolution, however here no one seems to care. Liberty, equality and fraternity doesn’t matter if you are poor. Once poor, they will insidiously sink into an addiction, laying their bodies to waste through tobacco, marijuana, local hooch, cinema, or randbaazi . The poor are threatened into silence and servitude, evidence of which I had seen in Madhav’s grief-filled eyes full of unspoken misery. I can see Pinnacle Towers across curving row of buildings of Marine Drive only when the air is clear as it is now. It is as if I am looking at you darling, my dikri , through a gauze curtain of dust particles and ambient pollution. I know that you are looking at me too from your window. The morning sun is blazing down on the slow-moving traffic of Marine Drive. Wealth is not shared here, it’s snatched away. Right now exploiters of men who confine themselves to the cold draughts of air conditioners in the tall buildings of Nariman Point are sitting down on plush chairs and making their employees miserable. As I was! Selfish men who will not share their wealth, men who will do anything, even kill to hold on to their money. I will see them grovel for their lives, later on, when my time comes, darling Priya. Just you see!
Meanwhile I phone Bharat Shah, chief financial officer of Pinnacle who is the one who would release the money due to me after I quit Pinnacle Constructions. I have not received my last two months’ salaries which they say will be part of the final settlement. My finances have hit a low and I wouldn’t be able to hold on much further on my present bank balance. I am not living in luxury right now, but I won’t be able to afford Sea Blue Hotel, too, if this goes on. I don’t want to move back into my room in Elysium Manor, it would be calumny. A disgrace. How would I face neighbours in that hell, that purgatory, where people with their feet into their graves fight endless tussles, conflicts, the skirmishes that they should have sorted out when they were more sane and rational? I ask to be connected to Bharat Shah.
“Kem cho ? How are you Bharatbhai?”
“Oh, our management guru? Dinshaw? Maja ma . How did you think of me? Tell me.”
Pleasantries aside, I would like to wring the benchod’s neck if I could get to him.
“My salaries for two months haven’t been paid, Bharatbhai. What’s the delay?”
“Oh, it’s in process. I will look into it.”
It’s in the process. The exact words I had to use with the multitude of my suppliers when I was with the company. It’s same Bharatbhai, the tyke, the patterned-shirt-wearing boor, who would delay paying my suppliers and make them starve. Pinnacle Constructions delays money owed to its vendors. On any given day there were hundreds calling me and Marilyn to check on the details of their payments. Some people gave up and preferred to lose interest. All these are deliberately done as a part of a grand strategy, perfected by Bharatbhai, the financial kingpin, the money wizard, to be the country’s biggest constructor of flats for the poor. The imbecile! He didn’t care a heck for the poor. He had the curse of a thousand poor people hanging on his head.
“When will this process get over? If ever. Huh?”
“Being sarcastic Mr. Bandookwala? That won’t impress Veereshbhai Mehta.”
“I am not here to impress anyone, I want my money,” I scream into the phone.
“Don’t shout at me, have some patience.”
“Patience? What patience are you talking about?”
“You know very well all this takes time. No?”
“No. I don’t. All I need is my money.”
“Boss hasn’t approved your final settlement yet.”
“You tell that machod, your boss to have patience,” I scream and violently bang the phone on its cradle.
The sea is calm outside, a deathly calm, a virtually unceasing calm, broken only by the cry of sea gulls and the low hum of traffic.
I am shaking with anger. Then I lie in bed and my body quivers with uncontrollable sobs. Somehow Bharatbhai’s crudeness has upset and angered me. My anger turns into shame when I think of you. I think about you, as I do mostly these days, my sweetest, and cry bitter tears. I have no money, I have no wife, I don’t have my daughter. All is lost. I am alone, alienated, broken just like those poor slum-dwellers I had met in the Charavi slums. I am a besieged man, I don’t know to whom to turn, I don’t know what is going to happen to me. My M.B.A. from Harvard is of no use to me. Oh! How I miss Harvard and Boston and California and Mountain View. I should have stayed there and not come here. I lie on bed and sob. I feel wretched, the sky outside blurs, the cry of the gulls feeding on fish is a distant echo, the muffled sound of the hotel staff tip-toeing in the corridor is like a phantomime, soundless, only existing in the imagination. I get up, drag a chair to the balcony, climb on it, wanting to end it all, wanting to float down and land on the hard concrete sidewalk below. Thud! Then I look up at the hazy skyline of Malabar Hill and I think of you. Swarms of butterflies appear from nowhwere and float down the sky and occupy my tortured shoulders, torso, and arms. My little sweet darling, Dadda didn’t do it (because Dadda couldn’t), he couldn’t float down into his eternal abode, just for you. I withdraw my legs extended over the balcony wall, just so that I could see you again one more time. The butterflies flutter away into the deepening haze of day. I climb down.
Then I fall into a tired comatose sleep.
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P.S.: All Indian words in the narrative has been annotated. However, sadly, Blogger didn't accept the footnotes (compatibility glitches, you know), which actually exist in the manuscript.
